Automating JUNOS

Automation. The benefits I find of automation is that workflows that are in place can be taken and performed on demand without manpower or assets assigned at every stage. Over at Juniper it seems that automation is a big focus of their work. Hell, they have a whole business unit. Aptly named too.

Juniper’s latest product

On the Friday of #NFD4 we had some presentations by Juniper. One presentation that really perked my interest was Derek Winkworth (known better as @cloudtoud) and Dan Backman. These gentlemen work on purely one thing. Automation within JUNOS. In 15 years from now we will know this to be Skynet. Some of the techniques that these guys showed were mind-blowing. Their presentation was engaging and exciting. My mind wandered with possibility.

Automation

Having a scripting engine built-in to it, JUNOS allows for execution of a scripting environment unlike many other offerings. The technical details are hard for me to convey for the fact that I am illiterate in scripting. I saw a great application in the development of troubleshooting scripts which L1/L2 engineers can run to perform tasks quickly and promptly with information being polled running back to a centralized point. Now just someone whip this up for me and we will be right. 🙂 Provision of Virtual infrastructures, diagnosis of faults via concatenating multiple sequences together provide very unique tools moving forward.

If a picture is worth 1000 words then the Video should give you a thesis

The video of the Automation in JUNOS presentation will describe to you many things. It will show you what is possible on a small-scale. It will also show you what is possible with an amazingly delicious beard. Exciting things are to come from Juniper. I look forward and await with anticipation the full-scale adoption of device automation. If I get my hands on something that runs JUNOS I will try some scripts out in a lab environment.